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Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "The ongoing efforts to assign responsibility for the disastrous attempts to create the Cover Oregon health exchange, the primary contractor for which was Oracle Corporation, have entered a new round, with Governor John Kitzhaber calling on State Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum to initiate legal action against the firm. Kitzhaber has also sought the help of Washington D.C. in sanctioning Oracle, though Oregon's own management of the project and the terms of their contract with Oracle muddy the waters, considerably. Although the AG's office hasn't committed to filing suit, yet, AG Rosenblum has said, 'I share your determination to recover every dollar to which Oregon is entitled.' Although the outcome of this is uncertain, it is likely heads, both corporate and political, will roll."

Except that Oracle had control on some of the healthcare sites for larger states and delivered a working product on time; also Oracle was part of the team that was brought in to fix the main site and are credited by Obama himself for getting that working.
Oregon is just an example of poor management, from picking the products to use before having requirements, using the wrong type of contract, and then not doing proper check and those checks that were done were ignored by the government management.

The free market isn't always the answer (and I'm somewhat of a libertarian). All the big iron and big database companies have a history of making big promises, then delivering something that isn't capable of doing what the sales people claimed. They're also experts and hiding bullshit in the contracts so they have their asses covered. But if they were given another few million dollars they can fix things. Pinky swear.

Yep, the people of that state ARE the losers, which is why the government they elected is seeking to redress the wrongs done to them by the corporate parasites who exist simply to siphon as much from actual productive entities as they can.

Even at the highest levels Oregon's government is remarkably innocent of current technology, process management, best practices, effective purchase evaluations and so on. They seem to be organizationally well insulated against an injection of good sense as well. It is a wonder every IT story from there doesn't have this ending.

When Oregon’s new Chief Information Officer, Alex Pettit,was on our show recently, we asked him what stood out from his move from Oklahoma to the northwest. He said there were some expected cultural differences, but that in terms of IT he was caught by surprise:

I was surprised that things like open source wasn’t as bigin government as it is in the East Coast, or in Oklahoma, where I was. I was surprised that transparency wasn’t a bigger issue. It’s certainly a big issue in Oklahoma, and it’s less so here.

This was striking because Oregon is known for its open source community — at Oregon State’s Open Source Lab, at the annual OSCON Conference, and among many programmers. And his comments came right before an Oregonian op-ed argued that open source software could have prevented the Cover Oregon fiasco.

I used to work at the State of Oregon Datacenter. Open source is highly avoided. When I was there a few years ago, there were only about 150-200 Linux machines (virtual and physical), if memory serves. There were thousands of Windows servers, many of which could have just as easily been Linux. The entire atmosphere is that of, "avoid Linux, avoid open source." It's as if management is intent on spending lots of money. Even though I still live in Oregon, I've been laughing every time something new comes out

You know whats funny about this - the internet which you used to post this was a government run project that was delivered on time and under budget (source: I heard that on one of Cringely's interviews with one of the principle architects on PBS)

Looked this up and they were off by a under three months. They were suppose to deliver the four computers by August and it did not happen until October.
One major difference between this and what Oregon didn't do was the for that contract they had well designed requirements(according to the people doing the work) the company that was awarded the contract was expected to deliver a working product(something not in the Oregon contract) and there was contract management.

She did not commit to filing suit, but said, "I share your determination to recover every dollar to which Oregon is entitled."

You can say a lot of words without promising anything. I particularly like "recover every dollar to which Oregon is entitled". It could be $0 or $1 or $100M, because she didn't mention how much that is in her opinion.

No, its not useless but it is pointing out the obvious to many who dont realize it.. Often times in these situations each side does blame the other 100%, when the reality is both sides need to 'man up' and accept some responsibility.

If this would happen, it would save a lot of time, and money by avoiding long drawn out and expensive litigation. ( which in the end its really our money, the consumer and citizen )

I live in Washington state, and I think we're to blame - at least in part. All those Oregon programmers kept coming north to smoke weed here. I was a bit surprised Oregon didn't have plenty of its own already, given its reputation; but no, you'd see those guys all over the place asking "where can I find the good stuff, man. The GOOD stuff! I need a hookup, man!"

Our own health insurance exchange did well after the first week - that's when we fired all the stoners and hired every Mormon coder we could find.

That was only legalized recently. It's being a state with no state income tax next to a state funded only by state income tax, which has been the ongoing situation for many years. More of the people with brains enough for a high paying job left in Oregon don't care so much about money. Among the smart people left who do care about money, there's doubtless a higher percentage of financial predators feeding on the higher percentage of financial gullibility in the surrounding population. This reinforces th

A bad idea originating from the Heritage Foundation? Naaaah. Never happens.

Part of the mistake is not having a decent paper-based fall-back plan, although that's no guarantee against general systematic glitches. I would note that Bush's Medicare Part D also got off to a rocky start.

Oregon produced an audit of the Oracle Debacle here: http://www.oregon.gov/DAS/docs... [oregon.gov]
The audit answered the wrong questions. It accepted the magical notions and vapor roles of Oracle's corporate propaganda. For example, it focuses on the need for a 'systems integrator', as if every engineer should -not- be responsible for integration.
The two big problems:
1) The computer industry's current authoritarian obsession with subdivided tasks, specialization, core competence, detailed requirements, 'no surprises' (meaning no good surprises, either), and dogmatic 'best practices' has created a generation of corporate slaves who aren't allowed to use their minds or take responsibility for anything important.
2) Which brings us to motivation. Oracle and other corporate oligarchs only want money. They have no responsibility to do anything else. Maximizing the bill is the sole priority. Three programmers, picked at random, who live in Oregon, and who have friends that need insurance, would have finished this job with FOSS, not proprietary software, in half the time a fraudulent Oracle and a corrupt State's office took to generate a broken system.

>Three programmers, picked at random, who live in Oregon, and who have friends that need insurance, would have finished this job with FOSS, not proprietary software, in half the time a fraudulent Oracle and a corrupt State's office took to generate a broken system.

Bullshit. Without specs, it would have ended up exactly the same. Therein lies the issue. Everyone thinks you wave a magic "consultant wand" (or H1b, or outsourcing) and everything just *poof* appears.

There's nothing magical about developing software without authoritarian relationships.
If someone says: 'we need a website that lets everyone shop for the cheapest insurance', a developer without a spec would simply start asking questions.
Where does the data come from? Who is allowed to register? How do we inform the insurance company? What are the policy options? How do we know the policies conform to regulation?
Seriously, any small unmanaged team of rational programmers would ask these questions. If

Oracle is less likely to get future government contracts in other states or levels if they have the reputation for being a drama queen and "difficult", regardless of fault. They may be better off quietly negotiating a compromise and eating some of the costs in the short term. Is the loud approach part of their Ellison bravado culture?

Oracle is less likely to get future government contracts in other states or levels if they have the reputation for being a drama queen and "difficult", regardless of fault. They may be better off quietly negotiating a compromise and eating some of the costs in the short term. Is the loud approach part of their Ellison bravado culture?

You've obviously never done business with Oracle. Oracle has the same attitude about their customers as Microsoft did in the 90s. The just don't fucking care. You HAVE to have them. Everything corporate IT is in some way related to Oracle and Cisco. If you want to use anything else, you need smarter (higher paid) people, software that's not as common, and it's harder to find people that know juniper for example. Oracle knows this, but they overplay their hand. I don't know many people that like Oracle anymore. I know at least 3 companies I've worked with that have sued, and won cases against them. Nearly every contract I've been involved with them in has ended in legal negotiations of some sort. We avoid them like the plague now, but for some things we have no other choice.

Even in the 90's it was so bad that a friend of mine in Florida used to set up a new corporation for each contract so that if/when he was sued, they could only seize the assets of the corporation the contract was with. And those corporations never owned a damned thing, because they leased their hardware from another one of his corporations that owned all the servers, software, and to which all the profits of the individual contracts were funnelled.

They are literally dumping the money because the contract was not based on delivering a 'completed project.' What ever state attorney who did that needs his balls kicked. The governor's assertion that a reasonable person would assume that any project would be completed shows his lack of legal expertise, their are no false advertising claims because a "reasonable person" would have to believe those claims but according to the case law "no reasonable person would believe ANY advertising" therefore, "get fucke

I have to think that the "owing to my naive reasonableness, I was duped" argument can't fly very well in a situation where Oregon had an attorney involved in making the contract. Perhaps, in the future, Oregon can use the "we have naive attorneys" advertisement as bait in a sting operation.

They should fire and sue whoever was stupid enough to even seek a quote from Oracle let alone the person who decided to go with them. Oracle is a bunch of lying, scamming, unintelligent scam artists who go 2-3x over their budget on every large project they have ever worked on in all of human history. Plus, the end result never works correctly. If a contracted suggested I get Oracle to work on a project for my company, I would laugh for about 20 seconds straight then ban them from the project. We even ha

With outsourcing you get a lot of contractors and subcontractor that at times can be locked into one part of a big project and it times all the layers of PHB's and other stuff may it take time for issues to work there way from one team to an other team.

As an Oregonian and engineer, I was so surprised when they went the Oracle route. For a situation like this, you've basically started out guaranteeing the result they've seen. Oregon state politics is interesting enough as it is without getting contractual corruption and national party machinery in the mix. I also happen work in the defense industry, where contracts and results like this are practically de rigueur, and it really makes me wonder how blind/naive/ignorant you have to be to expect anything othe